LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The Dominionists in the USA love to whine and cry about how they are being 'persecuted' when someone stands up to their religious excesses. They have no clue what persecution really is. Christians in the Middle East face a growing wave of Islamic fundementalist intolerance, and have been emigrating to friendlier countries.

Here's the Speigel article about this. Note that this is a German paper- you will never read about this in US media.

It was a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, who founded the nationalist Baath movement in 1940, a career ladder for Iraqi Christians until 2003 and still a political safe haven for many Syrian Christians today. Former Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser had no qualms about paying homage to the Virgin Mary, who supposedly appeared on a church roof in a Cairo suburb after Egypt's defeat in its 1967 war with Israel. And former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, insisted on sitting in the first row in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during the annual Christmas service.

But those days are gone. The last prominent Christians -- Chaldean Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister for many years, and Hanan Ashrawi, Arafat's education minister -- have vanished from the political stage in the Middle East. And since the election victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the bloody power struggles between Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq, the illusion that Christian politicians could still play an important role in the Arab world is gone once and for all.

Egypt's Coptic Christians, numbering at least 5 million, are by far the Middle East's largest Christian minority. The Coptic Christian Church, which dates back to St. Mark the Evangelist, begins its calendar in 284 A.D., the high point of Roman persecution of Christians. Its spiritual leader is the 83-year-old Pope Shenouda III.

Coptic activists have been complaining about discrimination at the hands of the Egyptian state for years. Yussuf Sidham, editor-in-chief of Watani, a Coptic weekly newspaper, says that unlike the 1970s, there is little open violence between Muslims and Christians today. "Instead," he continues, "we are now struggling against the sick ideas of Islamic fundamentalists. There is an ever-widening gap between liberal and fundamentalist forces."

When Egyptians elected a new parliament in 2005, the ruling National Democratic Party included only two Copts on its list of 444 candidates -- and today only one cabinet member, the finance minister, is a Coptic Christian. Sidham faults the party for promoting this way of thinking. "The party says that candidates were elected because of their religious affiliation. Copts stand less of a chance. So why put forward Copts as candidates in the first place?"

This sort of persecution is nothing new in Egypt. When Napoleon's troops advanced into the Nile delta in 1798 and occupied Egypt, they noticed strange customs. Coptic women were required to wear one blue and one red shoe. The men were permitted to ride on horseback, but only facing backwards. The French quickly realized that the Copts were subjects "de troisième classe" -- third-class citizens. Some continue to feel that way today.

When Christians apply for an identification card in Egypt, they are occasionally registered as Muslims -- without their knowledge. Once the record is official, it can take up to a dozen visits to the relevant government agency to amend the entry.

For decades, obtaining a permit to build a new church in Egypt was a true test of patience for Coptic Christians. Under an archaic Egyptian law from the Ottoman days, no less than the president's approval was required for a project as insignificant as repairing a church roof. Hosni Mubarak, the current president, only abolished the law last year.

Coptic women who work for the government and refuse to wear a headscarf are routinely harassed, as are Coptic men who find themselves working for the wrong company. A 31-year-old employee of a major American software company says that his boss faces daily harassment. His problem, says the employee, is not that he is a poor supervisor, but simply that he is a Copt.

Life is even more difficult for the estimated 100 Egyptian Muslims who convert to Christianity each year. Violence erupted in Alexandria in October 2005 after a play was performed about a Copt who regrets his conversion to Islam. A number of Muslim demonstrators were killed and a church was damaged. Abandoning one's faith is a serious crime in the eyes of most Muslims. But for Christians who want to convert to Islam, the government has even introduced a streamlined procedure. About 1,000 Copts convert to Islam each year.

***

Many Christians currently see a ray of hope in neighboring Syria. Since the fall of Baghdad, the regime in Damascus, isolated by the United States, has taken in many thousands of Iraqi refugees. In doing so, it has demonstrated to the West the long-forgotten merits of the Arab nationalist Baath Party's non-denominational doctrine. "Nobody here cares whether we are Sunnis, Shiites or Christians," says Farid Awwad, a souvenir vendor who fled Iraq.

Awwad's 12-year-old daughter was killed in an attack on a Chaldean church in Baghdad two years ago. "No one can take away our pain," he says. "But at least we can live here, where we are treated like brothers."

The number of Christians within the Syrian Baath Party organization is disproportionately high, although most are non-practicing. Their presence in government service, including the military and intelligence agencies, is unprecedented in the Arab world. President Bashar Assad recently opened a conference of Arab law associations under the motto: "The fatherland is for everything, but religion is a matter for God" -- words that would be alienating if not impossible in countries with a stronger Islamic influence. In Saudi Arabia, for example, which has no Christian minority of its own but employs tens of thousands of Christian guest workers from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, Christian church services are banned and punishable with severe penalties. Bibles and crucifixes are routinely confiscated. The Wahhabite religious police, the Muttawah, have even been known to raid private religious services.

Other Gulf states are more liberal, although religious freedom in the Western sense is virtually nonexistent in Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The Islamist opposition in Damascus, especially the banned Muslim Brotherhood, disparages the country's unpopular Christians as "worshippers of a godless regime."

Read the whole article. These people are truly persecuted, and the sad thing is, these are descendants of Christian groups mentioned in the New Testement. It's really sad to see this happening to them- some of them managed to survive the Crusades, for God's sake.